Help with dropping out a background

BP
Posted By
Brian_Peart
Feb 11, 2004
Views
199
Replies
3
Status
Closed
I have some 5x4inch transparencies of watercolour paintings. Unfortunately when the trans were shot, the A/W was not perfectly illuminated and the trans are going grey/blue in the edges and corners. The painted area is within the white paper that surrounds the A/W. Its the white paper that’s going grey/blue, not the painted area. Is there an easy way to drop out the area of what should be white paper to pure white? I’ve tried various selection routines, but nothing works really well. Using PSCS if that helps. Thanks.
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P
Phosphor
Feb 11, 2004
Image—»Adjust—»Selective Color…

Select Whites from the drop down menu and yank those sliders to the left. Pay attention to how this affects the colors you want to keep unchanged in the painting, as it can also affect light tints of of other colors. Generally, though, I have pretty consisent good results doing this type of thing using Selective Color.
RW
Rene_Walling
Feb 11, 2004
You may also want to use an adjustment layer with a mask to ensure none of the painted area gets affected.
JS
John_Slate
Feb 11, 2004
Sounds like you have a light fall-off problem, which is difficult to correct for, unless you do so in a mask that more or less follows the contour of the fall-off itself. Without the mask, the correction needed to bring the outer edges to "white" printing values, will adversely affect the central regions of the artwork. It’s really a problem of overall increased density by virtue of less light on the fringes, and using selective color may help limit the extent of the damage to the better lit sections, but will not really even things off to reflect the true nature of the original.

Films unforunately are linear, and record differences in light which the eye, being more analog, cannot see.

The masking process you need is strictly a manual process, and frankly, it would be better to reshoot with more even lighting if you can, than trying to cope with what you have.

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